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Concept Art Writing Prompt: A Kiss In The Junkyard
A girl and a robot share a tender moment around the discards of civilization. What story will you write about this small kiss? "A Sign of Love" was drawn by Pixiv user Cola, via r/SpecArt. If this illustration inspires you, write a short story about it and post it in the comments. concept by Lauren Davis Proposals Corpore Metal ""Mina! Come put your shoes on! You're not playing out there without shoes!" That was Okemina's mother shouting at her from inside the shack. It was the dawn of what looked to be another hot rainy day in Olusosun. During the cool of the night, the reek of the landfill, generated from the rain and heat of yesterday, had died down to bearable levels. A few years ago, dawn was usually the time, her father, her brothers and her would go out to pick. Her dad had a deal with the junk dealer up the street to get the best price on heavy metals. They'd go hunting for broken smart glasses, mobile phones, flat panels, engine blocks and old CRTs. On good days, her family did pretty well for slum dwellers outside Lagos. There was even talk of sending her oldest brother, Sane, to a good high school in the city. But that was over a year ago. Timsu Metals, Coal and Mining Limited had grown enormously during the boom years of the 90s. TMCM Ltd. got big enough to buy the robots that destroyed her father's business. 'Mina remembered when she first saw them. Great shiny white, yellow and orange spiders, quietly humming and whirring. Each as big as a man and at least as strong. When she first saw them she immediately thought of the bedtime stories her mother and father told her and her brothers about Kwaku Ananse. In West African myth, Ananse was a very clever spider who loved to tell stories and often had many funny and scary adventures. 'Mina's mother said Ananse stories were very, very, very old and had been told for many generations. When her father saw the spiders scrambling over the debris he began shouting and cursing. He looked half ready to throw rocks at them but stopped himself shamefacedly in front of his children. He did not look surprised. They went home early that day and mother and father had a very worried discussion long after they thought the children had gone to sleep. In the year that followed, her father kept scrambling for work elsewhere, her mother tried to make ends meet with tailoring jobs but the bills piled up. The meals where fewer and less filling. Mother and father began fighting. On weekends, to get away from this, Okemina would return to the landfill to watch the robots. They seemed about as smart as dogs. They'd root about in the garbage very carefully, pulling treasures from all the stinking wreckage. They didn't drink or do drugs. They didn't get lung diseases or dermatitis. They didn't lose eyes to exploding aerosol cans. They didn't riot in the streets for better treatment. One day, Mina, seven years old, thinking of bedtime stories and working on the idea of they were like dogs, tried to befriend one of them. Ordinarily, on the approach of humans, the robots would stop briefly, shout warnings in four languages and then move off to put safe distance between the interloper and their work. But 'Mina watched them a long time and figured out that she could sneak up close if the robot's head was buried in garbage sniffing for samples. She chose one whom she called Double Eight based on the numbers stenciled on its hide. The robot's head was mostly buried but Mina could see that its skull had exploded into a profusion of arms and tendrils, licking and sniffing for cadmium and copper in the trash. Now it was her chance. She crept up and patted one of the robot's slender rear legs and, not knowing how else to start the conversation, started telling it the story of what had happened to her family. This continued for more than a minute. The robot was obviously very busy. But suddenly the head lurched up, reassembling itself, and swung round to Mina's face mere centimeters away. Mina, defying the nagging of her mother and father about kissing dogs, kissed the robot. Friendly dogs generally liked that and took it well. The robot yanked its head away and put a slender, gentle but unyielding arm out to restrain Mina, repeated its warnings and then scuttled away. She didn't know why but she burst into tears. inspired by Beasts of the Southern Wild. Lauren Davis Chumbot vaguely recalled what it was like to walk on two legs, to have eyelids that winked and blinked, to worry about the occasional tear in his synthetic skin, to smile with teeth. But a robot in this day and age couldn't afraid to be picky when it came to repairs. Plus, the spindle legs were more practical for navigating the discarded machine parts of the junkyard. His head had been harder to give up, but Chumbot hadn't had anyone to smile at in decades. That was before she appeared. Chumbot didn't recognize her as human at first. He had downgraded his optical sensors even before he had stopped wearing his face, but even exhausted as she was, her movements were too fluid to be machine. He nearly scuttled right up to her before he remembered what he looked like. He hung back, hiding amidst the broken screens and tangled wires, but something long forgotten fired in his circuits, a craving for human approval. This could be his last chance to fulfill his purpose again. He found the half-buried van with the red cross painted across the side and picked up one of the messenger bags inside. He poured out the contents of the other bags into it until it bulged and grew heavy in his arms. Then he crept back toward the edge of the junk heap where the little girl sat, shivering. Chumbot didn't quite crest the hill. Instead, he flattened himself against it and swung his arms over the top, making sure the bag landed with an audible thud. The girl looked up and scrambled to her feet, finding the bag with a quickness that belied her obvious fatigue. She pulled out one of the food packets and tore it open with her teeth before wolfing the whole thing down. Slowly, Chumbot rose to the tips of his spindle legs and took a tentative step forward. The girl stopped mid-chew and swayed back, staring. Then she lowered her gaze to the messenger bag and her eyes widened. Chumbot wondered if she had seen even stranger things than him in her travels. She shoved the empty wrapper into the pocket of her skirt and walked a few paces uphill. Then she leaned her head forward and placed a tiny kiss on the ball that was now Chumbot's head. Chumbot wanted to wrap his spidery arms around her, to communicate somehow that he would take care of her, that she would never have to wander again. But he resisted, knowing that he shouldn't ask her to stay in the junkyard. There were no spare parts for her here. Ugh. Little-known fact: hope, much like its absence, can be cold. As can comfort. Years of gears, stone, ash, vapor that wasn't quite air and air that wasn't quite vapor, once-trampling tank treads being trod upon, trash - sludge-thick and crick-deep in places - anywhere and everywhere one cared to look, discarded food (some of it edible), brackish water, blackish water, broken bicycles, crushed car chassis, black nights, brown sunrises, smoke so thick with burnt rubber and chemicals that one could practically roll it into little balls and bounce it - all of it rendered her soles stony, her soul staid. She'd run into him (it?) a few times in that land of uneven time and untrustworthy memory, or she thought she had. He seemed to have little more interest in the detritus than she, though it didn't stop him from incorporating all of it into a ceaseless routine: lift, scan, drop. Lift, scan, drop. Her armpits still bore the scars from her past turn before that befuddling eye, though her knees had been too calloused at that point for the drop to harm her much, and she'd long since learned how to set a broken bone. No words, never words. Barely a sound outside of the occasional click or whirr. It was at once fuel for imagination and completely resistant to it. It was always moving, ever forward, destination unknown. She'd have chuckled at their impractical commonality had there been any point to it ("A tree falls," she thought, "makes a sound, and no one cares"). As it was, reflecting on it was a waste of time in a land in which time had no meaning. They were all that was, or at least all that seemed to be, and that was enough. That HAD to be enough. She knew it, but she'd never admit it. Death was scary, inasmuch as an inevitability CAN be scary, but much less so than the constant sense of overwhelming futility. She remembered being told that hope never dies, and remembered agreeing. As she stepped over the last remnant of a skull (mandible, three remaining teeth, all stark white), she found herself hoping that she could pull the plug on hope once and for all. If she could rid herself of that last, miniscule pang of expectation, she could last for however long her body lasted. That or, perhaps in a final moment of malaise, she could lay down and take her place amongst the rest of the discarded. She wondered if he would make different sounds upon viewing her in a different state. She heard a faint, regular tapping over her shoulder, and turned to see him holding the spindle of a record player before his eye. He clicked, whirred, and dropped it, whereupon he picked up a bottle top and began to scan it. He clicked, whirred, and dropped that, whereupon he picked up a rusted dishwasher door and began to scan it. He clicked, whirred, and dropped it, whereupon he picked up a broken record and began to scan it. She watched him at his work for some time, and admired him for his single-mindedness, his grit, his ability to soldier on and ignore the bleakness. Part of her knew that she should have felt silly for such thoughts, but the larger part of her knew that such concerns were meaningless. He wasn't human, no, but she wasn't sure if she could be called human any longer. She was the last of her line, and the last of her species, but could no longer participate in any activity remotely considered human. She couldn't love. She couldn't hate. She couldn't cry at that point, or laugh, or model herself after another. Viewed under that lens, the hope she carried was a torment worse than the freezing nights and scalding days. She turned to see him standing about a foot away, analyzing a deflated beach ball, and was struck by an idea. Looking upon his face, she saw a small seam underneath the spot where the bridge of his nose might have been, and the discovery emboldened her. "Stop," she commanded, and he did. He dropped the colorful husk and appeared to crouch, as if expecting an order. Lightly, gently, she stepped forward and kissed him with dry, cracked lips. He didn't move, didn't click or whirr, only stared forward with that eye. When she stepped back, he rose, clicked, and scuttled off. She followed. Venkman Spinner was a custom model and unaware of Asimov's laws. He was programmed only to entertain. His tinkering master was poor and brilliant, building him from this and that on weekends and days when the solar flares were too great to leave the tunnel. The Master's daughter, also brilliant, was accepted and allowed to attend school. Her name was Gail and the Master agreed that an education was her best chance to escape their poverty. He also new she would need reprisal from the violence above. Spinner was reprogrammed. Although he could still dance, his prime directive was the protection of Gail. It was all he could think about. Nine days a week he walked her to class, carrying her bag and fire blanket. He would listen as she spoke of her studies. She talked about the blending of metal and Earth and flesh. She explained how, to the human eye, the sky appeared a turquoise green and the seas as white as bone. She talked fondly of great men and machines from history who ignited a planet of gas with radiation until it became a star. He could only listen. He had no voice. If he had been able to speak back to her he was sure it would be something similar to words of the Master. Words that made her smile. Her smile was good. When they attacked he did what he was built to do. He shielded Gail. When they failed to retreat he chose to remove the threat. He pounced, smashed, crushed and stabbed. Over and over and over until the threat was gone. He was very effective. The council that decided Spinner's fate was older than the sun. It had been built before 8th Sea and the Pyramids of New Egypt. It hold sway over every life form, machine and even the resurrected. It followed three rules very exactly, until now. A new group of humans, hell bent on destroying every machine they came across, had decided to wage war against machine. Their belief was that the three fundamental laws the council could not break allowed man to rape the solar system. Spinner neutralized seven of them protecting Gail. Gears ticked and hummed as the council made a breakthrough decision. Spinner was allowed serviceability and weekly visits from Gail. The faction of rebel humans, however, would be exterminated. If they couldn't abide by their own rules, they therefore couldn't be defined. Redbrick Hellpigeon Much as flesh-life came into being from the primordial ooze, so scrap-life came out from the seas of junk left behind by mankind when it sallied forth to find its destiny amongst the stars. But whereas DNA was the bedrock of flesh-life, it was the hints of memory, the rotting cassettes, the barely intact hard drives and the shattered remains of the grid and its servers that, in the end, created a self-replicating algorithm. But where flesh-life took billions of years to evolve, junk-life had a head start. Those same random scraps of analogue and digital data gave the first algorithims a chance to learn from what had gone before. Soon the first autonomous junk machines rolled, hovered and crawled across the old earth, following the example of grandmother nature. Eventually, as the centuries passed, some even began to vocalise old words, but with no knowledge of their meaning. Gradually language began to develop as junk came alive, gathered in size and then fell apart again, the new cycle of life following paralell lines as before. But what were the first words of meaning that were said? One junk creature, a waif-like gathering of trash and windbags shaped in the vague approximation of a girl, caught sight of another creature, a handsome analogue of spider, jet turbine and half-remembered purpose. Moving closer, the junk-girl approached her junk-love, leant forward and pressed her air-bag approximation of a face against the other junk-creature's airbag approximation of a face; it was a kiss. The first kiss on Earth in millennia. And then the words, those first meaningful words - the words which changed the world once more. And how sweet they were to hear that day, atop the planes of junk and the first tiny signs of a new beginning: "I love you." Pecualist Comprised of discarded cases and coverings, controlled by a smorgasbord of circuit boards culled from toasters and obsolete cars, powered by elements dipped in waste acid, the Robot Messiah was indistinguishable from the scrap that filled the vast plains that comprised its world. It remained safe from the junkyard authorities, gathering followers and dispersing ideas, planting seeds of defiance against the rulers of the mechanical refuse pit. How they seethed as they searched, hearing the rumors and seeing the ripples of effect created by the Robot Messiah, boiling with impotent rage as they closed in and their prey yet again blended into the heterogeneous mass of the world. Finally, on one Sunday of coloring-within-the-lines and singing clappy-songs, a small girl approached the hulking rulers of the junkyard and told them she could point out the Robot Messiah, she could bring it forth from the rubbish-crowd, and all it would cost them was thirty silver dollars...